I had every intention of blogging during and after the Equinox Summit earlier this week. As it turned out, things were way too interesting and the conversation far too engaging for me to get even a couple minutes to dash off a note or two. For those who don’t know what I am talking about, the Equinox team and the Eclipse Foundation held a two day “summit” involving current Equinox committers and contributors as well as a number of key consumers of Equinox technology.

We were worried that with about 35 participants the group was a bit large for dynamic discussions. In the end we used a format that called for a series of 1 hour break-out sessions followed by plenary summaries and further discussion. This worked really well in my opinion. By having the group pick the session topics we pretty much ensured there was something for everyone all the time (thus no blogging time :-)  The results of the summit are captured as a series of presentation slides and breakout session reports.

The N things I took away from the summit:

1. p2, the new provisioning platform is hot on people’s minds
2. Server-side Eclipse via both the Equinox server work and simply Equinox/OSGi on the server is impacting people today
3. PDE is not done yet
4. Component programming models (e.g., Eclipse extension registry, OSGi services, Declarative services, Spring, SAT, …) are at the center of it all so w’d better get it right

The next stop for Equinox enthusiasts is the Eclipse Summit Europe where there will be a Server-Side Symposium and a Provisioning Symposium.  See you there!

Philippe posted earlier today with some sad news.  Plug-in is still plug-in and not plugin.  But wait Philippe, not all is lost!  Plug-in == Bundle!  So good-bye plug-in (and plugin for that matter) and hello bundle.  Use it in your code, with your friends, in documentation and presentations.  It’s simple, easy, shorter and has no pesky horizontal lines.

As some of you may have seen in Wayne’s post a while ago, Eclipse Summit Europe is coming up and there are going to be a series of workshops and symposia. He mentioned the RCP experiences workshop (sounds like lots of fun) but I’d like to point out the Provisioning Symposium. Provisioning is one of the hot new areas in Eclipse with p2 in the Equinox Incubator and Maya (soon to be Maynstall) as well as interest and overlap in several other projects and product teams. This symposium is designed to bring together people interested in provisioning to talk about their usecases, technologies and potential contributions.  It should be a great time so send in your name to summit@eclipse.org and let us know you are interested in coming.